Debian Weekly News - September 7th, 2004

Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. We've been informed
about a Debian translation party taking place
on September 11th, in a place close to Milan (Italy). Lars Wirzenius
has recently updated
the Debian lessons
document that covers project management. The Hong Kong Aircrew Officers
Association revealed that they use Debian for its fast setup process.

Sparc Upgrade Trouble. Joshua Kwan noticed
that currently one can't run dist-upgrade from woody to sarge on
sparc without upgrading the kernel since glibc complains and refuses to
install. However, to upgrade the kernel, one first has to get the new glibc.
Steve Langasek has asked him to build transitional kernels which are also
needed for true i386
machines.

Testing Migration uncovered. Andreas Barth explained some bits of the testing migration scripts that are of interest
for Debian package maintainers. In particular he explained what "outdated on
..." means and how packages in testing affect the migration of more recent
versions. Manual hinting is also required for packages with circular dependencies.

Configuration of Authentication Methods. Fabio
Tranchitella reported that he and Giuseppe Sacco are writing two small utilities to
update the pam modules configuration and to manage
/etc/nsswitch.conf. Their target is the automatic configuration
of pam modules and the NSS service for LDAP, NIS+
and other network environments.

Supporting system-wide Environment Variables. Sami
Dalouche wondered if Debian provides a similar mechanism to Gentoo's
env-update. Daniel Burrows pointed out that the Debian
Policy Manual says that a program must not depend on environment variables
to get reasonable defaults since not all shells support system-wide
configuration files where they could be set.

Removing non-free RFC files. Anibal Monsalve Salazar wondered
if he needs to remove RFC files from the .orig.tar.gz archive as
well, since their license don't comply to the Debian Free Software
Guidelines. Stephen Frost added
that he should ask upstream to remove the files instead and Peter Eisentraut
asserted that upstream may consider the removal as action to diminish the
overall value of their package.

Unofficial buildd Network shut down. Goswin von Brederlow
stated that the unofficial buildd network he is involved with has been
shut down. As reason he reports about concerns which have been raised about
developers signing uploads built on systems that don't belong to the developer
or weren't accepted for the official buildd network. Ingo Jürgensmann added
that this network has helped maintainers in getting their packages into sarge
and helped in speeding up the tiff3g transition.

Unbuildable Packages in Sarge. Bastian Blank reported
about 250 packages that currently don't build in
a pure sarge environment. He used a temporary i386 buildd network. Only some
build failures are
the result of build dependencies that cannot be satisfied in sarge.

Serialising Cron Scripts. Abdullah Ramazanoglu proposed
to serialise daily, weekly and monthly cron scripts so that they don't ever
run in parallel. His solution includes two daily scripts which are run as the
last ones from the daily run and which decide whether to start the weekly or
monthly batch of scripts. He later noticed
that fcron is already doing
so.

Debian rejects Sender ID. The Debian project announced that it cannot implement or
deploy Sender ID under the current license terms. Debian would even be forced
to remove Sender ID support from software packaged in Debian that does support
Sender ID upstream according to the terms of the social contract. This statement
strengthened the position of the Apache Software Foundation.

Interview with FAI Author. In an interview (German only), Thomas Lange talked about
the features of the newest release of the Fully Automatic Installation
(FAI) for Debian. New features are support for the upcoming
sarge release, booting with either 2.4 or 2.6 kernels, and use of
libdiscover2 for hardware recognition.
The most important feature of FAI is however the good customisability,
making it possible to use it in lots of different environments.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were
added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain
important updates.

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a
different Debian package is featured from the testing
distribution. If you know about an obscure package you think others should
also know about, send it to Andrew Sweger.
Debian package a day introduced the following packages last week.

Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and
requires a new maintainer. This makes a total of 176 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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